It also pollutes the mind of ignorant people with misinformation. Not that that is anything new. But I do think objective truth is very important in a democratic society. It reminds me of that video that used to go around that showed Sinclair Broadcasting in like 20 some different ‘local’ broadcast news all repeating the same words verbatim. It ended with ‘This is extremely dangerous to our democracy’. With AI being added to all the search engines, it is really easy to look something and unknowingly get bombarded with false info pulled out of the dregs of internet. 90% of people don’t verify the answer to see if it is based in reality.

Very good point, I wasn’t aware of how that prisons are more profitable than asylums. It makes it seem like the prison companies and republicans might have had some motives in common to push for ending asylums. Prison companies obviously would want more slaves prisoners to increase profit. Republicans would see it as a built in source of voter suppression in certain urban generally left leaning areas since prisoners either can’t vote or vote in different more generally rural areas. This goes to show that economic and political interests can have a big effect on issues like this that seem like more social issues at first glance.

Do you mind sharing what company and country you when with for the VPS and why?

Related tangentially, but I was sad to see the older conservative kid won the fight (via settlement after losing in court) to control newscorp. I hope the other 3 kids who each got more than a billion for giving up their stake in the propaganda factory actually do something to help society. They won’t but I hope they do.

Whaaaaat, You aren’t happy to witness dead internet theory become more real before your eyes. So surprising.

I for one will take my AI Slop and I will treat it as if it is a human like a good consumer. /s

There was 2 types of stories. First type was propaganda pushed by right wing outlets and influencers like Steven Crowder about manufacturer markings. Second type of story was released by federal agencies and is a little more trustworthy. First type of story was generally retracted. It’s a easy mistake to make when news moves so fast.

I think I heard the shooter jumped off the roof to leave, so if that’s true it would make some sense.

Walking to a friend’s house is nice as long as there’s not a big multilane highway with no pedestrian infrastructure dividing the town in between. Car dependency is a big problem in most of the US. Portland is probably a bit better than other places in that regard, but I’m sure they have still have some issues with it.

I would think this would be a good use for VOIP landlines since lots of places are probably doing away with dedicated phone wires.

Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, DC costs more than 4 times as much as it would cost to simply house every homeless person in the city according to researcher Hanna Homestead.

It’s a very fitting name for the researcher.

Nominative determinism strikes again.

Why can’t the people we vote for represent us?

Politicians were never meant to represent us (the people). We the people was war propaganda to revolt against the English and their king. They have, since the founding of the US, represented the business owners (landowners). And even after giving women and black people the right to vote, the system still mostly represents the interest of the business owners.

Bug report closed: System works as intended.

For the politicians to actually represent us, we the people would need to have some sort of broad agreement on what we do and do not want. But unfortunately, the people don’t have the needed experience or education to come to that agreement. So instead we get 2 different flavors of politicians serving the owners and none serving the people. Pick your favorite team, but they do not currently represent the people’s interest, instead they represent the business owners’ interests.

As a people, our job is to attempt to bend the politicians and business owners’ to our will using what we currently have at our disposal: our actions and our words. But that still won’t get anywhere without many other people backing up our actions and our words with their actions and words. It won’t be easy, but it is necessary if we want to shape our societies future. If we don’t do it, we get shadowy groups like the heritage foundation doing it for the business owners and pushing it on our leaders.

Also the politicians’ job is largely dependent upon them listening to the demands of the businesses lobbyist as of now. If they don’t follow their wishes they can expect a harder battle to keep their seat. They would get less big campaign donations and stronger primary challengers as a result of their noncompliance. This makes our job harder since it is difficult to get them to understand something when their job and salary depends upon them not understanding it.

Bold of you to assume he’s not already an undercover fed.

Asking ”what is tagalog” is really disrespectful waste of everybody’s time.

That maybe a bit of an ironic opinion in this community. :)

The phrase ”english and tagalog” clearly indicates that it’s a language. Moreover, it is a single word, which is really, really easy to use a search engine for.

I get that but clarification can be helpful for the next 100 people that read the thread. Chances are most people won’t search it but they still wouldn’t mind knowing anyway.

Maybe I should’ve put an ‘um aCtUaLlY’ in front of the first point as I knew you weren’t saying it literally. I didn’t mean to insult or to put you down, I know we all have different things that annoy us. Anyway thanks for being so gracious and empathetic. :)

No, they are not. Big tech corps don’t care about you, they care about profit. They will gladly assist in genocide for a bit more profit.

There is really no need to reply with that to tell someone to search something themselves. There are better ways to encourage someone to look something up than that.

It is also lowkey annoying to ask a question and get a glib answer like that.

I would say it is mostly an awareness thing. Electric vehicles are thought of as the best for the environment and people aren’t really aware or don’t care that they can cut their Co2 related output by about ~50% with their existing ICE vehicle. People just don’t know that they can choose to use a different fuel and have environmental benefits that way because no one from the car makers to the gas pumps really advertised or educated them on it.

A few car makers did have branded Flex fuel cars but really they were only branded that way to take advantage of a poorly crafted government tax credit. Many existing cars that can run e85 have no indication that they can run it and run cleaner with it which can lead to less maintenance issues and make the mechanic’s job easier.

With that said ethanol is in some respects a worse fuel, since it attracts water which doesn’t play nice with burning and as you mentioned is not as dense, but it is a much better fuel from an environmental perspective. Neither of those issues are deal breaker’s since you can just fill up a little more often or add a fuel additive occasionally to dehydrate the fuel.

I also think maybe the politics of farm subsidies for corn and ethanol are also somewhat of an issue, since massive government subsidies for corn growing and ethanol production are unfairly distorting the market quite a bit. But then again that’s par for the course compared with oil.

I have heard that most of the producers of ethanol have been bought out and taken over by oil companies, so I wouldn’t expect them to make a serious effort to promote it’s benefits or compete well since the oil companies wouldn’t like that.